More word-care, please. If the subtext here is the C of E synod vote against women bishops, tragedy is not the word to use. As Hegel and George Eliot observed, tragedy represents a conflict between right and right. But there was nothing “right” about the oppostion to women bishops. Visceral prejudice, grade-F theology, delusions about relationships with Rome, legalistic fastidiousness, whatever — what we had here was a conflict of right against wrong. And that is not tragedy. Rather, the synod played out a melodrama; or perhaps more precislely, a farce turned pernicious.